2D Game Framework Comparison: Defold vs Phaser vs Game Maker

We wanted to start a building new 2D game ideas we have in mind, and we thought
our favorite 3D platform so far (Unity3D) was not optimal enough to build a fully 2D game.
And despite having experience with some other frameworks like LibGDX (as we built
Exploding Bunnies ) along with some other Ludum Dare games,
we wanted to see if there is something better.

After some investigation, we narrowed the list to Defold vs Phaser.io vs Game Maker,
so we decided to give them a try by building a quick Pong demo in those 3 frameworks,
and gather some conclusions before we start building our next 2D game.

Defold

Propietary framework made by King (experts on mobile games). They have built a
promising editor with a lot of great features, like version control and easy deployment to multiple platforms.
Although it’s still on Beta, it sounds like this might be a trully solid option.

It took me some time to get used to the new concepts like the atlas and the collection, plus all the properties.
After a while, the whole framework reminded me of Unity3D, but simpler.
On the other hand, the current editor, which is based on Eclipse, gave me bad memories;
fortunately they’re moving to a cloure based editor now.
I got blocked during almost an hour because of this
scaled collision object bug
until I discovered the useful debug option on game settings.

Cons:

Game Maker

Probably one of the oldests game frameworks and still pretty popular,
I remember using this like 10 years ago, before I knew anything about programming.
And to be honest, it hasn’t changed that much since then.

The fact the free version only allows to generate window executables and
that the studio only runs on Windows was conclusive enough,
but also the whole framework is no much different from the others,
if you know programming.

Pros:

Cons:

Propietary solution

Windows only editor

No multiplatform (free version)

Uses its own scripting language

Version control issues

Slow runnable

Score: 3 / 10

Conclussions

We decided Phaser.io to be our next 2D framework. Of the 3 it was the faster and easiest to get started with. Defold sounds like with some polish it might be a sounder solution to use for real projects (for example, the mobile export is managed a lot better, or the integrated analytics are a bit plus); but the bugs we found on Defold while building this simple demo scared us a bit. Once it matures we might give it another go, but for now Phaser fits the bill for our purposes.